Let There Be Electric Light
From the would-be sleeper’s point of view, there’s very little to be said in favor of the electric light bulb.
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After Edison’s development of the light bulb in 1879, darkness as it used to be known ceased to exist. The gas lighting that illuminated urban homes before that year, and the oil lamps that burned in rural areas, were effective to a certain degree, but they had disadvantages that made it easy for people to turn them off and go to bed. For instance, reading for long periods was difficult by gas or oil, and they were dirty compared with electricity. Also, compared with just flipping a switch, there was a certain amount of effort, sometimes even danger, involved in using gas or oil. (Rather than deal with them, the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson preferred to compose many of her works in total darkness.) But with electricity there was almost nothing to it. By the turn of the century, you could stay up all night reading the standardized times of the train schedules.
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The introduction of electric light in the home was another important factor in distancing us from the natural cycle of day and night. But, by comparison, the effect on our sleeping habits of electric lighting outside was much greater still. For one thing, electric lighting of the streets greatly increased the level of safety people could expect when they went out at night. And electricity ushered in modern forms of advertising, which provided all sorts of inducements for going out.
Theaters, restaurants, and even amusement parks were fully illuminated, inside and out, within a few years of the invention of the electric light bulb. And at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893, the wonder of electricity brightened literally miles of consumer goods in a vast department store created especially for the fair. Throughout history, people had stayed home at night and, among other things, slept. They lived mostly in the country, and those who didn’t were too frightened of the poorly lit streets to take any chances. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, people were moving to the cities, and also moving further and further from the natural rhythm of light and dark, of sleeping and waking. They were certainly going out more, but they were probably sleeping less, and definitely sleeping worse.
